Frances McDormand and Brie Larson appeared at the Women In Film Crystal + Lucy Awards in Beverly Hills Wednesday night, with honoree Larson's award presented to her by friend Jessie Ennis. (June 14)
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Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which and Storm Reid as Meg Murry in Disney's "A Wrinkle in Time."(Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Disney)

There's more evidence out the ranks of film critics are overwhelmingly white and male, thus affecting the visibility of films by and about women, according to the latest study from San Diego State University in a report called "Thumbs Down: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters."

One month after the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported a similar dramatic gender gap, SDSU's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that male film critics outnumber female critics by about 2 to 1.

The SDSU study, conducted this spring and released Tuesday, found that overall men comprised 68 percent and women 32 percent of reviewers.

Who cares, you ask? Well, Hollywood in general and Oscar winner Brie Larson, in particular. The "Captain Marvel" star used an award acceptance speech last month to decry the lack of diversity among film critics, eliciting applause when she said she didn't need "a white dude to tell me what didn't work for him about '(A) Wrinkle in Time.' "

"It wasn't made for him," Larson said. "I want to know what that film meant to women of color, to biracial women, to teen women of color, to teens that are biracial. And for the third time, I don't hate white dudes. These are just facts, these are not my feelings."

But the gender gap matters, says SDSU's Martha Lauzen, because her study shows it impacts the visibility of films with female protagonists and/or women directors as well as the nature of reviews.

For instance, she says, female reviewers were more likely than men to mention the name of a woman director and use exclusively "positive" comments when writing about her work.

She found that 52 percent of the reviews written by women – but only 38 percent of those written by men – included only complimentary comments about the woman director, such as "master" or "impresario."

“Something as simple as the mention of a director’s name in a review, and labeling that individual as a ‘master’ of the film-making craft can help shape the narrative surrounding that director,” Lauzen says.

The study found that male reviewers conspicuously outnumber female reviewers in every media outlet from daily newspapers to trade publications such as Variety and The Wrap.com. They're also the huge majority of those writing reviews about films in every genre.

"For example, men write 78 percent and women 22 percent of reviews about horror and action films (and) men write 70 percent and women 30 percent of reviews about dramas," the study showed. Men also account for 69 percent of sci-fi movie reviews, compared to 31 percent for women.

Also underrepresented: racial and ethnic minorities. Most female critics, like male critics, are white (more than 80 percent each), but about 14 percent of female critics are minorities while only 9 percent of male critics are minorities.

The study examined 4,111 reviews written by 341 individuals working for print, broadcast, and online outlets in spring 2018 and whose work is included on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

The reviewers were chosen using a systematic random sampling method. Only U.S.-based critics who wrote a minimum of three reviews during March, April and May 2018 were included in the study.

Lauzen's center has been studying women in film and TV for years; the specific study of film critics began in 2007 and since then has examined a total of 16,420 reviews written by 919 reviewers.

Lauzen says "Thumbs Down" is the most comprehensive and longest-running study of women’s representation and impact as film critics available.

That study examined reviews of the 100 top grossing films of 2017 posted on Rotten Tomatoes – a total of 19,559 reviews – and found that reviewers are overwhelmingly white and male.

Only 22.2 percent of the reviews evaluated were written by females, compared to 77.8 percent by male critics. "This represents a gender ratio of 3.5 males to every 1 female reviewer," the study found.

The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative plans to release two more studies on film critics, including one on differences in review content by reviewer gender and/or race/ethnicity, and another examining the relationships to box-office performance.

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